Patent reform is heating up in Congress. Today House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte released a second discussion draft aimed at preventing abusive patent troll litigation. Chairman Goodlatte has suggested he will move quickly to hold a hearing and committee vote on this legislation.

Today’s draft incorporates many reforms that EFF has long been pushing for. These include:

It turns out two tech startups have banded together with patent trolls in order to fight off insane instances of patent assertion.

While this sentence may cause you to do a double take, it's sadly true. In the face of costly, time-wasting litigation, two young businesses have found their key allies to be the same entities that make life a living hell for thousands of other companies.

Nest Labs, a company that makes smart thermostats, entered into a licensing agreement with the notorious Intellectual Ventures, gaining access to their large patent portfolio. This deal would ostensibly help Nest fend off legal action from competitor Honeywell. In essence, Intellectual Ventures is acting as an arms dealer, allowing Nest to bulk up its arsenal.

The infamous patent troll Lodsys has been bothering app developers for almost three years now, claiming that in-app pay-to-upgrade functionality infringes its patents. No matter that Apple and Google provide that technology to the developers, and no matter that most app developers can't afford this kind expensive patent litigation.

To their credit, both Apple and Google have made efforts to defend their app developers—Google challenged the Lodsys patents at the Patent Office and Apple moved to intervene in the lawsuit against app developers. Today, we, along with the Application Developers Alliance, filed a brief in support of Apple's efforts.

Minnesota is the latest state to join the fight against patent trolls. It announced yesterday that it reached a settlement with the "scanner troll," who claims to own the technology for scanning documents to email and has been demanding that companies large and small who use this widely available technology pay up. This settlement follows what appears to be an investigation by the state's attorney general.